Year Two comes two years after Year One: Doodseskader (Flemish for "death squad") keeps it coherent. A lot can happen in two years: if you look at Tim de Gieter (Amenra) and Sigfried Burroughs (Kapitan Korsakov), for example, you can see that some of their hair has disappeared but some tattoos have appeared. Two years is a short time too: we still hadn't fully recovered from the explosion of their first album, which mixed industrial music, sludge, rap, grunge and a lot of other things, as long as it came from their guts.
Year Two has no shortage of guts. It's spat out, screamed at, sweated over and thrown in the face of the listener, sprawled there under our eardrums, stunned from the start despite a rather nuances beginning. Prison Pastel speaks of isolation, desire, the well-being that good company brings... but also of the visceral despair that suffocates us when things don't go so well. Romantic, Doodseskader? Of course they are. But not really in a cheesy and foolish kind of way: Year Two is an outpouring of heightened, morbid, melancholy, angry, radical and tortured emotions.
The screams burst forth, uncontrollable, cathartic, mad, possessed. The machines crush us. The thick bass imposes an oppressive, hypnotic climate from start to finish (Innocence (An Offering), uncompromising in its industrial coldness and merciless rhythm, Bone Pipe and its crushing, menacing flow), keeping the listener under tension. In bursts as sudden as they are violent, the apathetic vocals borrowed from the grunge scene mutate into roars or even abysmal, assertive growls (The Sheer Horror Of The Human Condition and its techno/black metal finale that we didn't see coming). Doodseskader like to mix genres and catch us off-guard, grabbing us by the throat with a sudden turn, a sonic explosion of contagious rage.
Doodseskader is skinned alive. The industrial horizons are sinister, and human existence takes on the air of a fierce act of resistance: you have to scream out your suffering in order to exist. The power of the repeated assaults and the eviscerated emotions keep us in a constant state of vigilance, even when the subject matter appears to be softening (Peine, Future Perfect (A Promise)): at any moment, we expect to be plunged back into hellish torments that are painful, of course, but also seductive and addictive (I Ask With My Mouth, I'll Take With My Fist, where we can once again savour the harshness of the Flemish language when rapped, doesn't wait politely to lodge itself in our skulls).
Year Two fascinates, of course, with its madness, its tendency to shatter the boundaries between genres, but it's above all with its sincerity that the album grabs us. A spontaneous explosion full of urgency, anguish, rage, frustration and despair, that also takes a few breaths here and there, where you don't know whether to tremble, give up or enjoy the grace of these few contemplative seconds. For all its radical honesty and richness, Doodseskader's second album is a treasure trove of pain that we're delighted to finally be able to enjoy. While we hope the musicians will be relieved of their sorrow by sharing it with us, we selfishly hope they don't get too much better: it's beautiful when they hurt.
